Life is Precious

I haven't talked about this for some time, so I guess it's time again to speak about it. Taking care of family members has always been a solid reminder about how precious life is. About Wednesday morning, I was taking care of my brother, and even though he seemed to be mostly normal at breakfast while I fed him, he started acting a little odd afterward. My initial thought was that he was constipated and needed help with that, but he was behaving the same way on Thursday morning, even after all that was addressed. He kept getting worse as the day progressed, and as I took care of him at lunch, it was to a point that he was really  acting up, behaving extremely uncomfortable, so we thought we better have him get checked.

This has always been quite a test for the doctors to diagnose. Because he can't tell us what he's feeling or experiencing, the doctor has to go off of what he examines and of what we tell him we're noticing. It's all guess work from deduction, but as long as he's lived, it's so far been effective. I've seen him come and go through a lot of scary things throughout his life, but somehow, he's always managed to pull through. I'm constantly amazed at his strength to endure these things. This time, it appeared to be an infection, so we had to put him on antibiotic, which is a challenge as well. He has so many medications already, and he only takes it mashed and put into food. Watching him struggle with taking it in (it's taste is nasty) has been a challenge for all of us, and his condition for the first few days before it started taking effect was hard to watch. Knowing a loved one is suffering makes everyone else suffer also. So there's a lot still needed for him to get better, but as time progresses, slight improvements are showing up, and there's nothing so joyous as watching progress in the right direction. 

In addition to that, another family member just had surgery, and now I'm helping in that recovery, so it almost feels like when I was taking care of my mom and my brother, at least for the moment. I'm glad to be here to help though.

I've been taking up one of my writing projects. It's about my experiences and memories about growing up with a disabled brother. It's grown to a novelette size now, so maybe if I keep going, it will be long enough to be considered a novel. There are a lot of things to remember about him, and I'm not sure if I have it all in there. This was something I'd been working on for some time, so his sickness didn't inspire it. It was something my oldest brother suggested to me several years ago, because I'm the closest in age, and have a lot more memories and experiences than the rest of them. Hopefully, I'll be working on that more frequently. 

He's been the best teacher of how precious life is, that's for certain.

Old picture of me and my brother during a family party.